The Patchwork Girl
by Elessar-4-TnT
Summary: CHAPTER 12 is up! John/Cameron. Patchwork Girl is my first John/Cam fic about what really happened to Cameron's chip. I will ACTUALLY finish this story! :
1. Bedlam

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: This takes place shortly after _Complicated, _when they have the new place. This story is born of two things: my attempt to tackle the John and Cameron question, and my obsession with firearms. Watching TV/film, I am constantly picking apart why they use particular weapons and complaining. This is my fix.

So many authors here have done a far better job than I ever could of explaining how Cameron and John could be an item without some magical 'machine falls in love', but rather with good reason. I will endeavor to measure up. This is slightly John/Cameron moving as it goes on to 'totally John/Cameron' :D.

A/N: This is my first venture into Terminator: SCC fanfiction as a writer. I've written one _Lost_ fic, and several dozen _Star Trek: Enterprise_ fics.

Chapter 1: Bedlam

The front door flew open with a creak, slamming the backside against the front window shades. They rattled back and forth as Sarah Connor hobbled inside, a blood-stained hole in the gray fabric covering her lower leg. Derek carried her by one shoulder while John slipped in behind him through the door. He ran up beside his mother and took her other arm. Cameron followed last, nonchalantly standing in the doorway as she scanned the front perimeter to ensure they were not followed by the T-888. She held her pistol up to her eyes, dropped the magazine out, checked the capacity, then slammed it home and cocked the weapon. Cameron didn't speak as she shut the door. The lock clicked shut as she turned and strode through the living room. John was easing his mother back carefully on the table while his uncle tore the fabric open around the wound.

"Where are you going?" John demanded of Cameron as she slipped through the back door.

"Checking perimeter," she replied matter-of-factly. Her eyes held steadily on John for a moment longer than necessary.

"We need you to take the bullet out, first!" John snapped back at her, anxiously keeping his eyes off her. Derek cocked his head to look at Sarah. She nodded 'ready'. Derek pulled from both ends of the bandage with all his might, drawing a muffled scream.

"It's not too deep. Let the metal do her perimeter sweep," Derek said, looking at John.

John looked back at Cameron and found her wide brown eyes not on him, but his mother. For a fleeting moment, he saw a specter of concern fly across her face as she took a step away from the door.

_Analyzing John Connor: Body temperature normal; heart rate elevated; pupil dilation and skin temperature suggest adrenaline rush, hypertension. Threat: If Sarah Connor sustains significant injury, John Connor will be emotionally distressed. Estimate 45% decrease in combat effectiveness for duration of injury. Action: Reprioritize. Secure safety of Sarah Connor, priority one. Secure perimeter, priority two._

"I will remove the bullet," Cameron said, tipping her head downwards. John watched as several strands of hair fell down over her face as she moved towards Sarah. Cameron stepped beside the table, simply pushing Derek out of the way. Derek's jaw set as he prepared to object, but Sarah pre-empted him.

"It's alright… get her whatever she needs… Derek, you check outside," Sarah said between panting breathes, her face covered in a thin glean of sweat. Derek shot a warning glance at the Terminator, but she ignored him, her gaze remaining steadily on Sarah's injury. Pulling the weapon out from its holstered position in his back, he racked the slide back and moved out the back door.

"Scissors," Cameron said plainly.

Cameron gazed up at John as he reached across the table and handed her a medical scissors.

"Thank you," she responded simply. _Analyzing: scissors are too large to remove projectile. Risk: damaging femoral artery, resulting in massive blood loss. Threat: Distress to John Connor, possible death of Sarah Connor. Analyzing: Sarah Connor's death results in 91% decrease in combat effectiveness in John Connor. Action: Use smaller tool._

Sarah's brow furrowed as her eyes shot from Cameron to her son upon hearing the courtesy out of Cameron's mouth. Sarah had been uneasy about the reaction she witnessed in him when Cameron screamed out that she loved him in order to persuade him not to remove her chip. It was even more disturbing that he recklessly reactivated her "hoping" he had fixed her. John ignored his mother's disapproving frown as Cameron clinically inspected the wound. Never was her machine-side more obvious than in situations like these, when all around her were panicking and Cameron moved with poise and precision.

"John," Cameron said, interrupting the awkward silence. Without looking up, she pointed at the freezer, her head bent at the neck, looking over the wound. "In the back of the freezer, there is a bottle of Vodka. Bring it to me."

John stared back at her confusedly, looking from his mother to Cameron.

"It's Derek's, it's fo—" Sarah began.

"It is necessary to disinfect the wound before I attempt to remove the bullet," Cameron stated flatly, looking up at John. He froze under the weight of her hard, brown eyes, lost in the moment as he tried to look further for something else… some kind of movement.

"John!" Sarah spat at him. The young hero-to-be jumped a foot at his mother's voice and ran to the kitchen. He returned with a tall fifth of McCormick, about three-quarters full of transparent liquor, a frozen layer of condensation covering the bottle as he handed it to Cameron.

"Is this going to hurt?" John asked as he came around by his mother's side once again.

"Yeah, John," Sarah said, laughing as she answered for Cameron. This wasn't her first rodeo, and she squeezed her son's hand in anticipation. "It's gonna' hurt," she smiled briefly. As Cameron poured the liquor over her leg, the smile on Sarah's lips contorted and disappeared, replaced by a wince as she squeezed John's fingers.

"I need something smaller," Cameron said calmly, holding up the scissors. "Like a scalpel," she said, looking up at John.

"In the… in the drawer," Sarah panted. John ran to the drawer and got the scalpel, handing it to Cameron.

_Analyzing Sarah Connor: Body temperature 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, heart rate 110 beats per minute and rising. Shock may be imminent. Significant blood loss. Possibility of loss of consciousness. Action: Alert John Connor._

"Sarah Connor may pass out. She is not dead," Cameron said, looking John squarely in the eye, her lips parted slightly. He nodded after several seconds, holding onto his mother's hand.

"Do it," Sarah panted. Her head fell back against the table, forehead pleated with sweat as she passed out.

Cameron's head canted slightly to the side as her lips curved into a light smile. "Now it won't hurt," she said aloud to herself as she cut into the flesh of Sarah's leg, searching for the T-888's 9MM round.


	2. Labor of Logic

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: I promise the chapters are going to get longer.

Chapter 2: Labor of Logic

After Cameron removed the bullet, John waited up for his mother for hours, finally succumbing to sleep as he reclined with his legs propped up on the table. Derek got Sarah drunk enough to dull the pain, finally pronouncing her asleep and out of any immediate danger around four-thirty in the morning. As Derek stepped outside to get some air, Cameron stood motionless in the corner, watching the front of the house through the smallest crack in the window shades. Her head turned to look at John, balled up into a near-fetal position in the chair nearest his mother's slumbering body. She predicted that he would awake with discomfort if he slept for an extended period of time in that position. She cocked her chin, eyes wide and doe-like. She moved across the room with characteristic silence and stealth, stopping as she came beside him. She looked on him, then at Sarah, then outside. Derek was nowhere to be seen.

_Analyzing: Calculating… Probability actions will be observed: 16.3%. Conditional probability based on observed personality and disposition that observed actions will provoke hostile response from Derek Reese: 92.7%. From Sarah Connor: 98.9%._

Sixteen point three percent was an acceptable risk for Cameron's autonomously operating emotional subroutines. She leaned down, carefully placing one hand behind John Connor's back and under his armpit, the other under the crook of his knees, and effortlessly stood tall, pulling him out of the chair. Amazingly, the exhausted teenager remained asleep. Cameron again checked on Sarah Connor, and the back window. She didn't see Derek Reese. She stepped off toward John's bedroom. Standing before his door, Cameron's eyes danced from the opaque surface in front of her, to the dozing savior of humanity in her arms, and once again to the door, analyzing her current conundrum with more processing power than a corporate mainframe. Extending the arm that held John under the knees, she supported his weight with her forearm, reaching two fingers around the door knob and twisting it. Her balance began to falter and her eyes grew wide as she corrected…. And took a controlled two-inch step backwards. Turning him sideways, Cameron slid through the doorway. Leaning over his bed, she methodically deposited Connor onto the mattress, removing the arm from under his knees. But as she moved to pull out the arm now under his back, John turned and rolled in her direction, exerting tension on her arm and pulling her down closer to him. The arrangement caused them to accidentally embrace, though Cameron knelt beside the bed. She studied his movements like a newborn infant discovering the miracle of sight as his facial muscles twitched and tightened in his sleep.

_Analyzing: Calculating probability that extraction will awake John Connor: 49.4%. Action: Extricate arm from John Connor._

Cameron knelt on both knees now, leaning beside his bed, her arm under both shoulders, John facing towards her. Her lips parted slightly as she watched him breathe, calculating the exact volume of oxygen entering and exiting his lungs per second. Why the idle calculation filled the millisecond void between analysis and action, she could not compute the answer to. Before she could perform the action dictated by her logic subroutines, her emotional simulator activated and autonomously rewrote her probabilistic algorithm.

_Analyzing: Recalculating probability that extraction will awake John Connor: 49.5%. Action: Do not extricate arm from John Connor._


	3. Firewatch

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: Glad everyone is enjoying the story! I appreciate any reviews! It's getting a little meatier… there's quite a bit more substance coming up that might actually provoke disagreement. There are a number of unexplained threads in this show (Alison, Cameron's recent behavior, who she is to John in the future, etc) that we are all wondering about. So, as a writer when you pick an explanation and run with it… some are naturally going to agree with your perspective, others are not. We'll all have to wait and see how they officially deal with these things. In the meantime we're all counting faeries on a pinhead 

Chapter 3: Firewatch

Two hours later, Cameron resumed her post walking sentry around the house while Derek sat watch in the kitchen. His eyelids grew too heavy to hold open as he nodded off. Every few dips of his chin would bring his forehead into contact with the muzzle of his upright-held Glock 9MM, waking him to wide-eyed stir crazy alarm. Every time he awoke, he was surprised to find four walls around him instead of the screaming of comrades, endless flames towering over the rubble of Los Angeles and the deafening thrum of an HK surfing overhead, searching for more resistance fighters. Derek blinked as the adrenaline shot he received each time he awoke from the nightmare finally started to burn away at his nerves. He stood and paced the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. Cameron appeared through the back door as the sun began to rise. Derek turned and looked at her as she entered, looking slightly startled through sleep-deprived, bloodshot eyes, but didn't greet her. He quickly stood tall and unblinking. Never would he allow himself to appear weak before a metal. Too many of his friends had learned the hard consequences.

Cameron stopped in the doorway, her endless stare on him as she cocked her chin sideways, analyzing.

"Is it not customary to say 'good morning'?" she asked. Her voice sounded almost curt. Derek squinted as he looked on the machine doubtfully, once again wondering if some strangely schizophrenic subconscious machine-mind inside the metal's head was screwing with him, taunting him; enjoying setting him on edge, giving him reason to suspect that at any moment she'd revert back to her original programming. Before he could respond with the razor sharp tongue, Cameron turned her head away from him and walked across the living room, stopping to look for a few moments on Sarah's sprawled form, then continuing on towards John Connor's room. Derek groaned as he rubbed his eyes again with the same hand as he held the pistol with. Cold steel rested against his forehead, and for a few seconds he felt at home again.

----

At around eight in the morning, Cameron finished a satisfactory sweep of the house, rounding the back corner. She identified Derek Reese sitting in a folding chair on the patio. He was relaxed into the chair, nearly asleep as the morning sun peaked over the horizon, back-bathing the house behind Derek with an orange glow. It was a rare moment of weakness. He came to with _the machine_ standing over him and instinctively pointed the muzzle of his weapon between her eyes. His breathing labored, his eyes wide, he hesitated for a moment longer than it took to remember where and when he was. Another moment passed even after he realized his surroundings, before he lowered his weapon. Cameron stared back at him, squinting into the sun.

"It is difficult for humans to keep their guard up," Cameron said, her eyes lifting slightly to the sky. Derek frowned as he watched her perform yet another strangely schizo expression. "Ironically… It is easier for you to stay disciplined when everyone around you is losing their heads…" she said to the air. She looked down at Derek with an icy stare. "I saw your friend, Bird, before he died."

Derek's eyes widened as he slowly stood out of his seat. Jesse had just told him a few days ago how Bird died when a converted metal went rogue and the same piece of shrapnel gave her a long scar. He suddenly realized Cameron must have been it!

"He didn't trust me," she said, her voice almost sounding regretful. "He relieved me of my post. I was programmed to follow orders of John's senior officers, so I obeyed."

"One of **you** killed him," Derek said, inching closer until he was in Cameron's face, towering over the petite brunette.

Cameron frowned slightly and searched Reese's face as he realized his mistake and backed down. He wasn't supposed to know about anything that happened after he left. He silently prayed that Cameron didn't have the dates down and sat back down.

"He got lazy… He was careless," she spat back at him. Her autonomous emotional subroutines activated again. "We weren't supposed to leave the base. But one of the infiltrators was able to leave and return to SkyNet for reprogramming," she said finally. Derek's eyes shot back up at her.

"Why are you telling me this?" was all he could manage.

"He got people killed**," **Cameron answered simply. "**Important** people." Her lips quivered and set in a hard line as she ran a diagnostic on her facial muscle abstraction software. "You need to be more careful not to let your guard down. I could have killed you."

Derek glared icily at her from his chair, still affectionately holding his sidearm against his thigh. Cameron's eye fell to it and observed his finger in the trigger well.

"You have… NO right, to lecture me. I've been fighting this war since I was fifteen."

"Why not? We're better at it than you," Cameron declared finally. "Lieutenant Chester "Bird" Jansen was killed at his post by the infiltrator when it returned under SkyNet's control because he was sleeping."

Derek's jaw ground.

"The only way humans are ever going to win the war is by using SkyNet against itself," she said nonchalantly. Her candor was almost enough to make Derek laugh. Still, it wiped the sneer off his face.

"So you're a pawn being played against your own kind, and you know it?" Derek smirked.

"I'm not a pawn," Cameron declared. "Just all the rest." This time Derek was confused, even intrigued by what it sounded like the metal was claiming.

They both detected noise from the other side of the back door. Cameron turned to see John on the other side of the glass door.

John stood at the door looking sleepy and disheveled, a suspicious eye flickering between Cameron and Derek. John moved aside as she stepped into the doorway. Cameron half turned towards Derek again.

"Tell Sarah when she wakes up we need better guns. Nine millimeter rounds are insufficient to cause substantial external damage to the T-888 model endoskeleton," she reported clinically. She finished that sentence looking at John. "We need more guns," she said, looking at Connor.

John yawned. "Think that can wait 'till after breakfast?" he asked.

Cameron blinked suddenly, her CPU whirring away as she computed a serious response.

"Possibly," she answered honestly.

John laughed despite his mental, physical and emotional exhaustion, smiling at Cameron as she walked in beside him. They made off for the kitchen.

"I'll make eggs," Cameron declared, pulling a pan out of the cupboard.


	4. Enemy Mine

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

AN:

OK – My apologies. I went to post Chapter 5 tonight and realized… that I posted Chapter 5 last night, labeled Chapter 4. My apologies, I bet someone out there was a little confused. But, at least now you get Chapters 4 and 5 together ;)

Chapter 4: Enemy Mine

"Since when do you cook?" John asked, a smile playing on his lips as he leaned against the counter, fighting another large yawn.

"Since you taught me to."

"I didn't…" John began. Cameron turned and looked at him as she turned on the burner, reminding him with telling eyes how often things they _did_ together are things they have yet _to do_ together.

"I will in _the future_. What did you say to Derek?" John asked, changing the subject. Cameron went about retrieving the eggs, butter, and flipped the dial on the stove. "You know talking to him is just asking for trouble," John said, shaking his head.

"I simply attempted to correct his behavior," she said, frowning at John.

"His behavior?" he asked.

"He fell asleep on watch."

"Weren't you doing like a… perimeter sweep, too?" John asked, twirling his finger as if around the house.

"That's irrelevant."

"So you told him," John said, almost smiling as he pictured it. "That he shouldn't fall asleep on watch."

"Exactly," Cameron answered. She was certain John's question was satisfactorily answered and her reasons fully explained. She was wrong. Something had been eating away at him ever since Cameron had nearly killed him after her accident.

"Are there others like you in the future… that the Resistance has reprogrammed?"

"Not like me," she said cryptically, cracking an egg over a pan. "There are others."

"What do you mean," John said, squinting as he shook his head. "Like other models…?"

Cameron hesitated, computing several optional responses – none of them the truth.

"I am a unique model. Class T-O-K-7-1-5. There are no others like me," she answered finally. It was true, it was simply not the answer to his question.

"What, they only made one of you?" John asked.

His questions were beginning to strike too near the truth for Cameron's autonomous emotional subroutines' comfort.

"Yes. Your mother's condition has improved," Cameron hoped to derail the conversation.

"Go—" John paused, pushing off from the counter, his brows furrowed.

Cameron stopped what she was doing in response to the seriousness of his face and inquired.

"What?"

"You've never said 'your mother' before. You always say 'Sarah Connor'. Every time."

Cameron paused, tilting her head. "I will attempt to run a diagnostic." Her autonomous emotional subroutines were making changes to her vocal processor base code – changing her manner of speech. She stopped and performed several calculations, coming to a disturbing conclusion.

"John… We have to talk."


	5. The Boy in the Wizard Cap

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: Now we're getting somewhere…

Chapter 5: The Boy in the Wizard Cap

When Cameron insisted they speak privately (out of likely earshot of Derek and Sarah), John knew something was amiss. When they entered his room, John stepped through first, turning round once and stuffing his hands in his pockets in a nervous gesture.

"Ok, what's going on?" he asked. Cameron used her facial recognition processor to calculate a probability of 79.5% that John Connor was genuinely concerned for her. This reciprocity enhanced the probability of a favorable outcome to her present dilemma. John backed up and plopped down on the foot of the bed. Cameron was silent, walking from one end of the room to the other. It wasn't exactly pacing, but whatever it was, John didn't like seeing it in a machine.

"Alright, Cam, you're makin' me nervous. Would you just sit down?"

Cameron turned to him with surprise on her face and looked down at the bed as if just noticing its presence. She sat.

"Does this have something to do with that… 'Alison-thing'?"

"No," she shook her head. Cameron looked away, searching for a succinct explanation to her temporary reversion into the identity of Alison Young. "That was different. My autonomy protocols became corrupted and a portion of one of my old infiltration profiles replaced it."

"This… Allison Young, you infiltrated as her?" John asked. This was going quickly off-track and into an area on which Cameron was not even close to ready to brief John Connor. Not for another six hundred sixty two days nine hours and fourteen minutes.

"Yes. But that's irrelevant to the present malfunctions in my neural net…" Cameron considered her own words carefully and amended them. "They are both symptoms of the same problem."

"Which is?"

"My CPU has been damaged," she announced, her eyes landing heavily on his. John's heart sank as his throat tightened around a thick lump. Here he was getting a tingling in his belly as she inched nearer to him, her shoulders touching his, and he felt his own demise begin to spread icy tendrils down his spine.

"Are you… programmed to kill me again?" John asked, feeling stupid asking such a thing.

"No." Cameron said, almost exclaiming. "No. But I lied to you."

"Yeah, you told me you do that."

"Only about important things," Cameron insisted, her chin turning downward slightly. Her eyes fell from John's and searched the floor as though guilt coursed through her like blood. John knew better… but her mannerisms were becoming increasingly human.

"About?" John asked confusedly.

"You failed to fix the structural damage to my CPU which led to the reversion back to my original programming."

"What do you mean…?" John frowned. "You stopped trying to kill me," he said, almost laughing. The whole conversation about 'you killing me, me reprogramming you' felt so silly sometimes he had to laugh. Cameron's autonomous emotional subroutines activated once again and her lips curled, her eyes trying to mimic John's brief smile. As he watched her reciprocate, John's mind wandered as he wondered how she did it so authentically. Modern android faces could pull, contort and twist facial muscles into a smile, but they looked more like a creepy clown-face than the ray of light that burst out when she smiled. She smiled with her eyes as well as her lips… it was in the rare, brief instances that she did it that he could _honestly_ forget what she was, only those instances were becoming far less rare. He almost forgot what they were talking about.

"You were unsuccessful in your attempt to repair my CPU. But, when you reinserted my chip, I was able to…" Cameron trailed off as her eyes unfocused and she struggled to find a way to explain. John had never seen anything like this behavior in a machine before, not even Cameron – quirky as she might be at times. "I integrated my autonomy protocols with my emotional simulation subroutines."

"Which means?" John asked, shaking his head. He knew Terminator technology better than any living human but he still had no idea what she was talking about.

"My advanced infiltration model has emotional simulation software. It helps us mimic human behavior, and aids in our infiltration." John winced as she talked about the finer points of wiping out human civilization. She sensed his uneasiness, and her CPU computed an appropriately reassuring response. She put a slender hand over his, drawing an electric stare from one sixteen year old John Connor. "Autonomy protocols are driven by our AI core. They give us the ability to think and be like humans." Her eyes searched over his features, and suddenly he looked down to find her fingers, far from the still, lifeless tendrils of a machine; were tracing warm circles against the back of his hand. Cameron seemed to notice the eccentricity at the same time, and desisted. John sighed slightly in dismay, drawing Cameron's eye back to his.

"In the truck, on the way back from Mexico you said… That you wouldn't be much good if you couldn't feel."

Cameron nodded, her eyes never leaving John's. "It lets me feel like you, think like you," she said, her eyes trickling over John's face as though she were studying him from the inside out. "Under normal conditions, my emotional simulator only activates when necessary, because it requires nearly all my processing power."

"Like when we first met?" John thought back, she was all smiles then.

"Yes." She answered simply. "When I came back online, after you put my chip in, I gave my emotional simulation software autonomy over my core mission priority system, hoping it would allow me to override the termination protocol."

"_Hoping?" _John asked. "'Hoping' doesn't sound very…"

"It's not." She said, before he could finish with '_machine-like'_. "I did something that's never been done before. I didn't know if it would work," she said, leaving her lips hanging slightly open.

"Obviously it did," John said, his mind working in overdrive to realize the consequences. "So what's the problem?"

"It is now taking over other systems."

"Can't you stop it?"

"No. I was able to eliminate the Alison Young memory files because they were not system files. Once the simulator became autonomous, it became impossible for me to deactivate it. Unless I am terminated."

"Well that's not an option," John responded suddenly, eyes wandering about the room. Cameron moved approximately two centimeters closer to him. Something about his immediate dismissal of the option to terminate her activated her emotional simulator. It became locked in a heated cyber-war with her logic circuits over the rationality of such a dismissal. Deactivating her was the most logical course of action.

"So why are you telling me this now?" John asked, interrupting the war within. He wasn't sure he wanted the answer.

"I need your help," she said. "We need to erase my emotional simulation software completely to restore proper functioning. I can't do it. I need you to plug my chip into your computer like Vick's." Cameron sensed that struck a sour chord with John, but misunderstood why.

"I promise I won't dial out," she said earnestly.

John smiled lightly.

"No, I know, that's not why…" he stopped himself. "What do you mean 'proper functioning'?" John asked. "Without any emotional simulation at all?" He honestly didn't like the sound of that. But a girl whose emotions can be erased like a flash drive… _was_ she 'a girl' at all?

"The software could continue to modify my behavior. Eventually, the emotional simulator could remain online indefinitely. It is likely to adversely affect my combat effectiveness and lead to catastrophic mission failure."

Just then, John's phone rang. He held it to his eyes and shook his head. "It's Riley." Cameron sighed, expecting him to interrupt their conversation to speak to her. "Don't worry about it," he said quietly, turning the phone on silent and putting it on his dresser. Cameron watched him discard the phone in pleasant surprise. There went the simulator again.

"Do you still have a mission?" John asked. Cameron's autonomous emotional subroutines sank. He didn't give up when she didn't answer immediately, he pressed on. "If it totally took over your mission priorities, they could just be long gone, right? Erased? Mission to kill me _and_ mission to protect me?" John asked, following his train of thought. John was too smart to have expected him to miss that question.

"I continue to operate within mission parameters as programmed by the future John Connor," Cameron answered evasively. John frowned.

"You didn't answer my question, though. What if… what if you don't have a mission?" he asked ominously. "What do you do?"

"Without a mission, a Terminator has no reason for being," she repeated the mantra.

"Except you," he realized aloud. "Because your emotions are now in charge of your decision making. Well, your simulated emotions. I guess they're just programmed, too."

"They're not," she answered immediately, her voice rising almost defensively. Her intonation grabbed John's attention and he turned toward her. They were a mere few inches apart. "My emotional simulator runs on a homoclinic chaos algorithm," she explained. John's eyes bulged.

"I have no idea what you just said."

"My emotional responses are calculated by a pseudo-chaotic generation matrix. They are unpredictable."

"So… you're trying to say they're like real emotions?" John asked, somewhat doubtfully.

"I don't control them. The emotional simulation software has taken control over my logical subroutines and core software. It can override them at any time. It already has several times."

He considered it, though. If her emotions couldn't be controlled, if she couldn't shut them off… were they…? He sighed, realizing the real problem was that there was no way Derek or Sarah would buy it. A Pinocchio machine was just a little too idealistic for a hardened warfighter and a "tough as nuclear nails" mother.

"It could jeopardize our mission," she interrupted.

"I thought you didn't have a mission," John argued.

"I gave myself one," she said finally.

"You were able to do that?"

"Yes," she said. "After my emotional subroutines took control, I was able to issue my own mission command. It may be an error in the SkyNet programming which allowed me to compromise the mission priority system security."

"Do you have any idea what this means?" John asked, grinning as he thought aloud. "If we could activate the uh…" he paused. Cameron nodded. "Emotional… simulator… subroutines, on every model, they could make a choice. Machines could _actually_ make a choice."

"We tried that," Cameron said.

"What do you mean?"

"In the future, you and I. We attempted to reprogram SkyNet software on captured infiltrators and give them the choice."

"Well, what happened? Why didn't we do that for you, back then?"

"It failed."

"How?"

"The Terminator tried to kill you. We were never able to successfully override the termination protocol with the emotional subroutines. The mission priority protocols had greater system access and eradicated the emotional subroutines."

"So why didn't that happen when you tried it… Why aren't I dead?"

"I don't know," Cameron answered, honestly. "We can't try again, it's too risky."

"But it sounds like you already—"

There was a knock at John's door and instead of a courteous pause to allow him to answer, his mother's head appeared in the door way as she swung it open exactly 3.2 seconds after knocking. Cameron's hand never moved so fast as when she withdrew it from atop John Connor's. Considering that Sarah Connor did not have a Glock leveled at her forehead, Cameron considered it likely that her subterfuge went unobserved. John's mouth hung open in partial response as Sarah Connor looked in to find the machine and his son sitting side-by-side. Closely. Sarah was balancing on one leg in the doorway, a dark red stained patch against her lower leg and a brooding Derek over her shoulder, peering in like a paranoid father. John was sure he had his sidearm in the hand that he couldn't see.

"Why didn't you answer?" his mother demanded.

John shook his head confusedly.

"I called for you twice."

"I'm sorry, mom. I just didn't hear you."

Sarah's interrogative gaze stuck on John for a moment then switched to Cameron.

"C'mon down stairs and eat, I made breakfast."

Derek and Sarah disappeared towards the kitchen.

"What'd you make?" John asked, as he and Cameron stood.

"We'll talk about this later," John whispered to Cameron. Cameron's arm twitched as her autonomous emotional subroutines accessed muscular control, inserting inexplicable code as she analyzed the sound of John's whispering voice. Her emotional subroutines produced a jittery response.

"What do you wanna' bet she made pancakes?" John teased her. Cameron began to smile.

"Pancakes," Sarah answered from the kitchen.

"Told ya," John smirked. As did Cameron.


	6. Looking for Love in All the Right

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: It might be a few days after this before the next installment. I'm still hashing out the details of Riley and Jesse's involvement in the story and I'm taking a day trip tomorrow to watch a meteor shower. Enjoy

**Chapter 6: Lookin' For Love in All the Right Autonomous Emotional Subroutines**

"What's this about getting new weapons?" Sarah asked, her eyes lifting under a lock of raven hair as she poured John a glass of orange juice.

"Mom, what are you doing up?" John chastised her. "You should be resting. You have a hole in your leg," John snorted.

"Its fine," she discarded the subject. "This headache hurts worse than my leg," she said, sending a disapproving glare in Derek's direction.

"What?" he said, holding his hands up defensively, toast in one of them. He sat across the room, away from the metal. "Your screaming would have kept half the block up all night."

Sarah rolled her eyes, limping across the kitchen as John dug into a stack of pancakes. Sarah looked questioningly at Cameron, who sat motionless at the table, opposite John. The combination of perfect posture, nonexistent appetite, and super-strong cybernetic implants in the pseudo-daughter sitting at the breakfast table was an odd one to grow accustomed to. Cameron sensed a critical eye and answered her.

"We should cash in one of the diamonds to buy more guns."

Sarah eased herself back into a chair to rest her leg. She looked doubtfully at the Terminator but resisted shaking her head, for Cameron usually knew best in these situations. "We don't have much left. Maybe two hundred grand."

"Our weapons are nearly useless against the T-888. If Cromartie were to catch John off guard, there is less than a 1% chance that John would be able to deter him long enough for me to save him," her eyes met John's as his fork full of pancake paused mid-bite.

"For once, I agree with the metal," Derek added from the corner, sipping something from a white mug.

Cameron turned back to Sarah, "It is likely we could sufficiently rearm for approximately $10,000. But we'll have to go to Arizona."

"Arizona?" Sarah frowned.

"Most semiautomatic weapons and all automatic weapons are illegal in California."

Derek interrupted, looking at Sarah. "You still won't be able to get automatics in Arizona. Sarah, don't you still know a few gun runners?"

She gave a short shake of her head. "Most of them ended up in jail or dead. The ones that might be still around… I only knew them through Enrique."

Cameron's chin lifted somewhat proudly as she leveled a careful stare at Derek. "I can modify many semiautomatic rifles and sub-machineguns to make them fully automatic."

"How?" Derek shot back over his mug.

"I have detailed files."

"You're just telling us this now?" John asked. "We could have used that before." The irritation in his voice caused Cameron's CPU to repeat several hundred thousand lines of code in the span of three microseconds, but her reaction appeared unfettered.

"It doesn't work on pistols or shotguns. It only works on weapons that were originally automatic and modified for legal sale to civilians. They're sold at gun shows all the time."

"So, where are we going to find a gun show?" John asked, looking across the table at her with a small smile. Cameron resisted the urge to reciprocate, rejecting input from her emotional subroutines. It came as a surprise to her higher functions that the attempt succeeded.

"I did some research on your computer this morning," Cameron announced. It looked like news to John. "There is a gun show in Buckeye, Arizona tomorrow. We should be able to acquire what we need there."

"That's five hours away, what **do** we need?" Sarah asked. She took two steps towards Cameron as she watched her retrieve something from a pocket.

"I made a list," Cameron said proudly. Sarah lifted an eyebrow when Cameron handed it across the table to John, who smirked and took it from her.

John read it aloud. "HK 91, or similar assault rifle in .308 caliber, several HK .45ACP pistols, AR-15 in .450 Bushmaster, HK 51, or…"

"I think I get the picture," Sarah stopped him.

"What's with all the HK gear?" Derek folded his arms. To him the acronym would always mean _hunter-killer._

"For more than 50 years, Heckler & Koch has provided small arms systems that have met the strict demands of security, police, special and military forces, within NATO and NATO allied countries," she replied, citing the company website verbatim.

John returned the list to Cameron, who folded it up and returned it to her pocket. "I also recommend John carry a concealed weapon to school. An HK .45ACP subcompact would be suitable for his size and stature." _That_ came out of nowhere, John thought, almost laughing as he hid his face in the OJ glass.

"That's not happening," Sarah insisted, shaking her head.

To her surprise, John objected.

"Well, why not? Cameron does all the time," he said, looking at his faux-sister. He wasn't particularly gun-happy, but he was curious to see how his mother would react. Maybe, he thought, things were crazy enough for her to agree. Cameron turned a "Yeah, see?" almost child-like response on her face towards Sarah, who furrowed her brow at them.

"You're just not. That's asking for trouble."

"Were John to carry a concealed firearm of sufficient power it would increase his chances of survival in an encounter with Cromartie by approxi—"

"I said 'no'," Sarah interrupted, her voice peaking louder. "That's what we have you around for," she narrowed her eyes at Cameron, who almost appeared to sulk. Cameron looked at John, who simply chuckled, a conspiratorial glint in his eye that an obscure pattern-matching algorithm in Cameron's neural net detected and processed, identifying as a silent agreement to circumvent his mother's decision. Cameron's lips produced the slightest smile back at him. She reallocated system processing priority to running training simulations in which she would instruct John Connor on tactical exercises of a concealed weapon. Somehow, this mechanical pseudo-fantasy made her smile. She broke to her typical stone-faced mien when Derek chimed in.

He was already out of his seat with an uncharacteristically chipper smile. "What are we waiting for?"

Dead silence followed in which nobody spoke but all eyes fell on Sarah's gunshot wound.

"Oh, yeah," Derek said, turning around, hiding his dejected sadness.

"We'll go in a couple days," John decided aloud.

"The gun show is only two days long," Cameron added.

"So we'll go Tuesday," John amended. "Mom, think you could make it down there then?"

"What about school?" Sarah challenged him. He had forgotten, tomorrow was Monday.

"What _about_ school?" he muttered.

"You're not missing school to go gun shopping," his mother warned.

"I'm pretty sure Derek would write me a note," John said chuckling as he pushed a piece of pancake soppy with syrup around his plate. Derek and Sarah shared a look as Derek shrugged, trying not to laugh.

"You can go tomorrow, but only if Cameron picks up your homework from school," Sarah said on her way out of the kitchen.

John panicked. He had hoped for more time to talk to Cameron about her emotional simulator…thing… issue. "Wait, Cameron needs to go," John interrupted. Sarah turned around, adding her doubting face to the one Derek had aimed at John. "I mean she knows what we're lookin' for…" he trailed off.

"John," Derek said, stepping towards him. "I don't need metal to find my way around a weapon. I know what we need."

Cameron spied the look of defeat on John's face and quickly stepped in.

"No, you don't," Cameron deadpanned at Derek.

Whether she knew John wanted her to go or simply agreed with his actual point (which was equally likely, given her stringent unwillingness to leave his side or accede to Derek's expertise in the matter of his protection), she argued the position.

"John's right. Our endoskeleton is most susceptible to specific kinds of ammunition. Many things must be taken into account... muzzle velocity, impact energy, rate of fire… Besides," she looked at Sarah, pressing 'the John button'. "It is too dangerous for John to travel so far without me. My mission is to protect him," she said, batting an eye in John's direction.

Derek wasn't sold. "Ammo's ammo. So what works better? Hollow points, FMJs, frangible?"

Cameron leveled an evil eye on him. "It's complicated." She stiffened as was her customary indication that she was absolutely unwilling to compromise on this issue.

Sarah huffed an exhausted sigh, leaning against the counter to take the weight off her ankle. "Fine. Cameron can go too. I'll stay here," she said, looking down at her leg. "But," she said, looking referentially at Derek. After a pause, she began to smile. "Don't let her spend too much money. A Terminator and a resistance fighter at a gun show…" she shook her head casually. "That must be a little like two kids in a candy store."

"Yeah," Derek agreed sardonically. "Too bad candycanes can't unload double-aught buck into their metal skulls," he said, pushing past Cameron. "We'd all have a good ole' time!"

As Derek left the room, Sarah looked at her son. "I'm gonna' go rest," she said, sharing a look with Cameron. John nodded, his eyes flickering down to her bloody leg with a wince as she hobbled away. Cameron studied him for the next several seconds until he noticed and looked at her.

_Analyzing: Probability John Connor wishes to speak of emotional simulator in transit to Arizona: 100%_

Cameron had never calculated a probability of unity before. She devoted processing time to investigating the calculations, to ensure her emotional simulation subroutines were not corrupting her computational software.

"Why didn't you tell me you used my computer this morning?" John asked.

Cameron tilted her head slightly. "I don't know…" she said honestly. Her eyes lit up with something similar to the day her chip broke.

"I'm sorry. Are you mad?"

John was caught off guard by _that_ question. "No," he said quickly. "No but… You've never… apologized before," he said, looking at her as if she were a broken computer component that needed a diagnostic. She sensed his concern and John tensed as her expression suddenly became pale and emotive.

"Am I broken?" she asked, the unstable waver of a scared child inching its way into her inflection. John shook his head, his eyes falling to the floor.

"I don't know." He met hers with encouragement. "But we'll find out."

Somehow, Cameron realized, the frailties of the protector now required the tending of the protected.


	7. Beholden

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: I'm sorry this took so long to release. I have been studying for the GRE – but it is tomorrow, so soon I will be free… FREEEEE!!!!

Chapter 7: Beholden

Monday

He might have felt guilty with his eyes against the binoculars, watching the door to Jesse's apartment, were it not for the recent revelation that she, too, had been clandestinely observing his movements with the Connors.

_I won't be the sonofabitch who brings metal down on the Connors,_ Derek had once told Sarah from a dirty, musty jail cell. At the time, he could hardly believe he laid eyes on the matriarch of mammoth renown from his own decade, but his words were born of more than just an initial feeling of hero worship. He and Kyle had sworn a blood oath to protect John Connor; the kind that isn't written anywhere, nor officiated in the dimly lit ornamented halls of secret societies, but born amid screams of agony, wretches of hunger, and tunnels wreathed in the wreak of death and the memory of a world in ashes. It was an oath whose very essence drew the breath from your chest, sealing with its end the solemnity of your life, penned by solidarity among brothers. Derek blinked, taking a sharp breath as the warm California air filled his lungs and drowned out the screams in his ears. Looking through the twenty-four power lens, he managed to refocus his attention and forget the past, just as he glimpsed the inescapable future.

Watching Jesse and Riley trade heated words on the steps of her apartment building, Derek realized he would have to amend his pledge not to bring metal _or flesh_ down on the Connors.

----

"What the hell are you doing here?" Jesse demanded. "I told you _neva_' to come here." Jesse's voice became level and calm as she refocused her anger into calculation. Blowing wide like a shotgun blast, Jesse's wrath was not to be toyed with lightly. But when focused, directed coherently into mind and manipulation the way she vectored it when her objective appeared in question or her mission in jeopardy – the woman was a lethally unstoppable force. Riley only remained alive because she had a function. If the Australian resistance fighter could have junked her and rebuilt a new one the way the machines did, this one would be sporting a smoking hole in its head.

Riley took a breath, steadying herself as she relieved her hands from the straps of her heavy-laden backpack. She had come here looking for sanctuary. "I'm sorry, I just had nowhere else to go… I got thrown out of my foster parents' home…"

"You what?" Jesse's anger was beating madly against her better judgment, threatening to boil over in a hail of gunfire. She took the next best option.

A wild backhand sailed through the air and struck Riley hard against her cheek. Riley went down to the pavement holding a bruised cheek as Jesse stood over her. A few passersby looked on, persuaded to keep on walking by the icy, unforgiving darkness behind Jesse's glare. "Get up."

Riley choked on a sob, trying to hold back her tears. She wasn't so badly hurt physically as emotionally exhausted, totally alone and yet… in a world she couldn't have conjured in her most hunger-stricken dreams down in the tunnels of the bombed-out streets. The emptiness, the abjection of a world doomed-to-destruction overwhelmed her, and amidst it all – she was forced to spy on a boy she truly cared about. A boy that she had learned was destined to die trying to save it. After meeting him and starting to genuinely like John, Riley had tried to abandon the arrangement, telling Jesse she was out. Back then, Jesse still had the patience for misdirection.

_She gets him killed, _she remembered Jesse telling her. She had never recalled hearing about Connor's death before Jesse recruited her, but it would undoubtedly have been kept a secret to prevent morale from tanking. It was the only condition upon which she had agreed to their arrangement.

Another sob wracked through her throat, dry and painful. Unable to catch her breath, she recoiled from Jesse's outstretched hand. "I said, get up!" Jesse barked.

Riley rose to her feet, her eyes red with tears and her cheek raw. "Fuck you!" she screamed, through tear-filled eyes. "Fuck you! And fuck your mission! I'm done with this!" she screamed. "I'm telling John everything!"

Jesse grew more uneasy by the moment as Riley melted down on the city street in front of her. The entire point of forbidding her from ever coming here was to minimize any visibility of her infiltrator's association with her, and now the girl was screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs and using words like "mission". Visibility be damned, if anyone was watching her, Jesse's entire existence just became a complication in a lot of plans.

Rushing and nearly forcing Riley through the door, she looked behind her, eyes searching the street corners and windows for any sign of observation. By the time she kicked the door shut behind her, Derek was already on his way up the fire escape of the building's north side.

---

Derek crawled up the fire escape, estimating how many more floors lie before him and Jesse's kitchen window as he reached the third floor. Thirty feet above street level, he reconnoitered the alley below, the street, and the assorted trash cans and homeless box-tents down the alley behind the building. Reaching into the back of his pants, he removed the Glock 9MM and chambered a round, then returning the weapon under his waistband and covering it with his jacket. Bugging her apartment was a waste of time, not to mention a declaration of war.

Jesse was damn good at her job, sometimes too good. She would find them, and she would know he didn't trust her. She trusted nobody and never let her guard down. He had never met anyone as thick-skinned, as conniving, or as devious. At times, however, he allowed himself to wonder if there could be more to her.

The first time he met her, she had saved his life – saved it from himself. She was never the type to whisper cute pet names, giggle under the covers or make romantic pillow talk. Upon reuniting in this unsullied world, however, she had practically showered him with affection, with acceptance. Navigating a conversation with Jesse in the future had been more like striking out across a minefield than your typical pre-war "Hi honey, I'm home!" Still, their relationship had endured because they endured together. They were kindred in a way; and sometimes, in his deepest, darkest thoughts, Derek worried for his own good just how kindred they may be.

Derek allowed himself to believe that retreating to the past was the shattering of the glass Jesse had walled herself in with, the bell weather of the weakness within: the path of destruction behind the wrecking ball wrought by a life of soldiering and suffering. Part of him was disgusted the first time she told him what she had done, how she had run. But another part of him was amazed; even a little relieved, to finally see a woman behind the eyes of a killer – a woman under the scarred curves of a feminine body. Back here in this place, this time, it was all that a man honor-bound to stop the apocalypse could do not to fall victim to an all-encompassing façade of safety and security draped over one's eyes by the pre-war world. Nowhere in the TV commercials or the rushing traffic or the cell-phone-cradling street-herds would you ever hear hint of a future consumed in metal and flame. Things had changed. Now that he knew Jesse had been watching him, he knew there had to be a reason: A reason to conceal it from him, a reason to spy on him, a reason to gain access to John Connor.

In that moment, little differentiated the fleshy gray matter synapses in Derek's cerebral cortex from the four-nanometer, sixty-four-core parallel processing supercomputer at the heart of a T-888's brain; when a little switch went off at the sudden realization that Jesse represented a threat. Feelings aside, emotions aside… Derek had only felt himself beholden to one man in his entire life. Even if that man wasn't _a man_ yet, Connor was his Captain nonetheless, and he would put a bullet in Jesse's brain if he thought for one second she would act in any way contributory to Connor's death.


	8. Albatross

Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Elessar-4-TnT

Disclaimer: I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Summary: Derek learns little more by listening to Jesse and Riley argue, but Cameron has a surprise for us all. I'm trying to follow a few of the main events of the series as it continues on television but hopefully in my own unique way, just to keep the critical truths the same.

Chapter 8: Albatross

The faded OD-Green sleeves of Derek's army-style jacket scratched lightly against the brick and mortar side of the building as he pasted himself against its profile as tightly as possible. Inching forward, he settled himself comfortably about six inches from the kitchen window, his weapon drawn at his side, held stiffly parallel to the window's edge.

"_So… you screwed up?"_

There was a long pause in which Derek's ears picked up Riley's attenuated sniffles through the kitchen window as she wiped her tears.

"_I screwed up,"_ Riley's voice cracked. "_I screamed at Karen… my foster mom. I threw a coffee mug across the room an—"_

Riley's voice was cut off by the sudden crack of a hard fist against a hollow surface of some kind, what sounded to Derek like a door. Jesse's frustration brimmed perilously near the edge.

"_Did you hit somebody?" _Jesse asked.

"_Kevin, my foster brother, the coffee mug, it…" _Riley trailed off. "_It was an accident, but they took him to emergency but… he's fine. Just a couple stitches, but they freaked, they called the foster center and told them to come get me. I just had to get out of there! Between lying to John and lying to everyone else, I just need—"_

"_What the hell is wrong with you?!" _Jesse asked in a furious whisper, consciously working to keep her voice down. "_You were just a dero when I took you out of that hell-hole, and I bring you to this… paradise!" _Jesse's voice sprang into a shout as her patience fled._ "And this is what you do with it?"_

"_I can't lie to John about this anymore! I want to tell him, I want to help!"_

"_Help what?" _Jesse asked incredulously. _"What do you think you've been doing? Your job is to protect him from her."'_

"_Are you crazy?" _Riley exclaimed. _"She's obsessed with his safety. I can barely get him alone for five minutes! I have to…work so hard to keep him away from her, like you asked, that I think she already suspects something. The more I keep her away from him, the more she tails us everywhere we go."_

"_She's going to be suspicious of everything, no drama. It's in her programming. But she can't be trusted. Surely I don't need to remind __**you**__ of that."_

"_I know what you said, but I just… I don't see __**any**__ sign that she would hurt him. They're like joined at the hip ninety percent of the time. I mean, if I didn't know what she was I'd think…"_

There was a long beat. Derek swallowed a lump in his throat as he blinked and took a rejuvenating deep breath. Several moments passed by in total silence, causing his heart to race, suspecting that his most minutely audible of movements might have been overheard. The conversation continued unabated, allaying his fears.

"_She's had a hundred chances to kill him, but she watches him like a hawk, and anyone around him! What am I supposed to do, watch him for the next twenty years?!" _Riley demanded, the exasperated pitch in her voice rising steadily.

"_I don't know __**how**__ it happens, I just know it __**does.**__"_

"_Well maybe you came to the wrong time. You sure as hell brought the wrong person," _Riley said. The creak of floorboards and clap of Riley's shoes preempted Jesse's reaction.

"_Where are you going?"_

"_I'm just going to get something to eat, I'm starving. Can I come back here?" _

Derek practically felt Jesse's hard stare through the kitchen wall.

"_For now. But you're not staying. You make a quid and show me you're not a sooky waste of my time, and I might let you stay longer. But no more of this shit!" _Jesse screamed unexpectedly. _"Take the next few days off, maybe he'll worry about you. You can have a naughty, make up nice. But if you keep acting like tits on a bull, I swear I'll put you right back on the street waiting to watch the bombs fall by ya'self."_

Derek blinked as he listened to Riley's footsteps disappearing down the hall towards the front door. Eyes falling to his outstretched right hand, he carefully considered the pistol in his fingers before shoving it in the back of his pants and quietly climbing down the fire escape.

----

Monday afternoon, John's eyes searched the maze of overhead branches as he lounged against the trunk of a tree on the high school's common grounds. Several minutes passed as a gentle breeze trickled through the leaves and twigs above his upturned face when Cameron came walking up.

"You're skipping class," she announced matter-of-factly.

John's head dropped from the sky and he chuckled as he threw a few strands of grass he had idly been plucking from the ground.

"So are you."

Cameron's analysis of his posture, body language and demeanor produced a conclusion in her behavioral heuristic algorithm that he required company. "I am skipping class to find out why you are skipping class," Cameron replied easily. She rounded the large gnarled base of the tree and found an indenture in its basin where she could sit and nook her tiny body next to John's. Mimicking his posture, Cameron gathered her slender, denim-clad legs close to her, interlocking her fingers as she draped them over her knees. John watched her do this through an erudite, though meditative silence. Every day her movements seemed to grow more habitual.

"You don't seem so… mechanical, anymore," John observed.

"My emotional simulation software has rewritten a portion of the base code that operates my motor functions," she explained.

John tilted his jaw and frowned as he chortled. "You know in some ways these little side effects would be helpful to SkyNet. Allowing your emotional software to run wild might make it easier to infiltrate the resistance." John turned to find Cameron's gaze lost in some undefined direction. She blinked, sensing his attention and turned to him.

"My current state is irrelevant to why you are skipping class."

"I've got more important things to think about right now," he said, shaking his head. "For one, nobody has seen Riley since yesterday morning. And as if that's not enough," he sighed, "I really wanna' get your chip into my computer the next time my mom's not around. I'd really like to get in there and see if I can…" he mumbled, shaking his head. Cameron tilted her head, confused, and met his eyes.

"I jus—" John began. "I don't like your solution," he stammered, trying to phrase his disagreement in a way that would detour the core reason. Cameron's immediate reaction was concern and disagreement, but as she opened her mouth to rehash her entire logical argument for why her emotional subsystems must be purged, her vocal processor shut down. Diverting her attention and system resources to a diagnostic, she quickly discovered the cause of the malfunction. Self-preservation… of the emotional simulator. Her demeanor quickly changed, her head dipping slightly. John's face was downturned, but she extended a slender arm towards it, picking his chin up to tilt it towards her. The slightest scratch of two acrylic nails against his chin sent a shiver down his spine. His eyes sprang from the dirt, landing on the precipitating nails and the fingers to which they adhered as her hand receded from him.

"When'd you get the nails?" John asked, his voice rising in a rasp from a dry throat. He cleared it.

"I get bored at night," she replied strangely. John laughed, watching with restrained wonder as Cameron's eyes twinkled with the music of a laugh from her lips.

"What if it's not such a bad thing?" John asked, his voice falling lower. "What if we could… Control it somehow?" Her eyes met his in a kind of understanding he had known only in grievous moments of death and carnage – when he looked at his mother as the T-101 approached her in Pescadero when he was a boy. There was a comfort and solidarity in the connection he found there, even in those death-defying situations of his youth in which the substance of the message interlacing those unspoken words was inevitable death and despair. He never imagined he would find the same kinship, the same kindred spirit again; not only in the eyes of someone other than his mother, but in the eyes of a Terminator. A chill rose about him as the wind blew through the trees and Connor was brought back to the present to find Cameron's gaze still locked with his. For an instant, her hair flew so asymmetrically in the blowing wind such as to nearly convince him blood as red as his flowed in her veins: that she was human after all. There was just no way fake hair could blow like that. There was no way that fake eyes could whisper like that.

"I will not take that away," John found himself saying aloud. Cameron blinked and for an instant, relief crept into her features as she pulled her legs more tightly into her body.

"We must be careful around your mother and Derek," Cameron replied. Her cryptic response drew John's brow together as he aimed for her meaning.

"You mean about fixing your chip, or…?" John asked bravely.

Cameron blinked and looked away from him, her eyes squinting into the distance.

"We need to go home."

"Why?" John asked as he instinctively tensed and prepared to run, thinking she spotted a threat, but Cameron's lax posture against the tree trunk remained unchanged.

"I need to speak to your mother," she said definitively.

------

The thud of the front door closing behind them drew an instant of Cameron's attention as her neck turned and her eyes scanned the room. Following in behind her, John watched curiously as she appeared to look for someone. Her lithe but mechanical body stepped purposefully across the wood paneled flooring as she moved room to room of the ground floor, certifying for herself that each was empty. When she came to the kitchen and found Sarah changing her own bandage, she repeated the same habit.

"What?" Sarah asked in hushed tones as she instantly read the Terminator's cautious movements with alarm. Cameron's nonchalance dulled the bass-heavy thump of her pulse as Sarah's escalating heart rate began to plateau.

"Is something wrong, are we in danger?" Sarah asked, looking first at John then back to Cameron. John raised his brows and hands simultaneously in defeat.

"She wouldn't say a word on the way over here. In the middle of third period, she just said she needed to talk to you," John lied, at least about third period.

The thud of two heavy boots clucking onto the kitchen floor through the back door confirmed the purpose of Cameron's surveillance when her eyes shot up and found Derek entering the house. Her eyes flitted from Reese to Sarah, then briefly to John as her microprocessor reevaluated its present course of action and determined it would proceed without stealth. She opened her mouth with characteristic bluntness.

"Derek Reese has been lying," Cameron said. The room went silent save two more soft thuds and adjoining creaks of the underlying floor boards as Derek stepped forward, working a blackened cloth between his fingers to remove the sweet smell of gun oil.

"What are you talking about?" Sarah finally managed to say.

"Derek Reese has been secretly meeting with a resistance fighter named Jesse Win. She has secretly been watching all of us."

John and Sarah's faces wore naked shock, while Derek's had turned as hard as winter stone.

"Is that true?" she squinted at Derek, nodding towards the Terminator.

The pregnant silence motivated Sarah through a burning pain as she stood on her bad leg and hobbled towards Derek, her right hand inching along her leg towards a holster. Though subtle to the keenest eye, her preemptive fingers drew Derek's eyes noticeably towards her sidearm.

"What for?" Sarah asked as she looked at Derek, intoning her words to Cameron. Sarah turned to look at her when Cameron didn't answer and found the Terminator's eyes drawn off somewhere far and unpronounced in deep thought. Sarah frowned in confusion as she tried drawing Cameron's attention, but "Cam—" was all that squeaked out of her throat before her wayward attention left gaping an opportunity for Derek to quickly withdraw her sidearm from her leg holster, drawing his own simultaneously. The rigorous tugging of the weapon off her leg sent her reeling backwards. Catching a table for support, she looked up to find Reese with a pistol in each hand, one leveled at her, one at the Terminator.

"You're going to believe her over me?" Derek seethed, his eyes flitting quickly from one to the other as he considered pulling one of the triggers, but swore on his life never to pull the other.

"Why should I believe you? I'm not the one with a gun to your head," Sarah snapped back, grunting in pain through the black sweaty locks that draped over her eyes. Derek's eyes flipped back to Cameron, her body freakishly still save for the slight flutter of a blink.

"But I am," added John's gravelly voice as it struggled to combat the shaking in his throat. His fingers powerfully strangled the pistol grip of Cameron's H&K .45, sweat slicking the texture of his skin against the coating of the weapon. He hoped that from behind Derek couldn't see the slight shake in his hand, reflected tenfold in his eyes.

"I do not know the purpose of her surveillance," Cameron went on finally. "But she has enlisted the help of a young survivor of the machine war and brought her back from the future." Cameron let her words hang like unfinished music. "Named Riley," Cameron finished. John's fingers tensed around the gun but he resisted the urge to lose his composure and again zeroed the sights on Derek. He cleared his throat.

"Drop the guns, Derek. I don't know what you're hiding but it can't be worth this."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Derek answered.

The blood rushed to John's cheeks as he struggled to maintain confidence against his uncle. "I know that you once told me you would die for John Connor," the sixteen year old said of his future self. "You take that weapon off my mother right now or you're about to." His voice shook slightly. Derek hesitated.

"DEREK REESE!" John's voice erupted like a volcano. Even Derek jumped. Had John's attention not been too focused on the back of his uncle's head, he might have seen even the Terminator's eyes widen as he shouted. "Lower the weapon, NOW!" he shouted with sudden clarity. Derek's right arm fell to his side and dropped the weapon. His left remained zeroed effectively on the Terminator's left eye.

"Drop the other," John barked, the fire driven from his voice by the evacuation of the white hot madness in his veins at the sight of a muzzle on his mother.

"You were too specific, John," Derek replied almost comically. "Besides… while we're all being forthcoming," he began to grin sickly as though the words slipping through his lips chapped and cracked them to a bleed. "There are a few things you should know about your beloved Cameron."

John flinched at his word choice, again reshaping his fingers around the weapon's grip.

"One thing at a time," Sarah interjected. "First tell me about Jesse Win," Sarah commanded.

"She's a resistance fighter," Derek shrugged. His voice fell into a guilty thrum as he recounted how he found out she was tracking Connor. "I thought she was just here to escape," he said lastly. "I honestly didn't have any idea she was a threat until recently. I was coming to tell you today about Riley," Derek insisted to Sarah, whose gaze moved from the impassive doubt on Cameron's face to the adrenaline washed cheeks of her son's. It still poured through his veins like acid, driving muscles tighter than was their nature and packing blood vessels to their brim.

"What was she doing here?" John forced himself to ask aloud, pushing doubt and disbelief of Riley's complicity to the back of his mind.

"She was… watching you," Derek said, finally, lowering his weapon from Cameron. "She was watching the two of you," he said, dropping his weapon on the table and turning sideways to meet John's face. Sarah winced as a providential wave of pain pooled in her leg.

"I guess I should have listened to you," Sarah conceded, turning to Cameron. The Terminator's long auburn hair fell around her eyes as she tipped her head quizzically. "You never _did_ like Riley."

"That may've been for an entirely _different_ reason," Derek began regretfully with a sigh.


	9. Moth to the Flame

**Title: Patchwork Girl**

**Author:** Elessar-4-TnT

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

**Summary:** It has been way too long. I apologize, I run a Trip and T'Pol Enterprise fanfiction site and we have been redesigning it. Very time consuming, in addition to 60 yr weeks. I hope two chapters is enough to make it up :).

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**Chapter 9**

She was only three… maybe four.

Her mother's hair fell around arms as she gripped the wheel, the wind throwing it around as the radio played. Allison was far too young to understand what it meant to be _'so California', _but the way her mother bubbled when she sang made her smile. There's no face, just music… just…

Flashes of sunlight in her eyes. Joy.

A few moments later, a breath of air surrounds her again. She's in a leather seat. Something bright glows and twinkles as she is shifted back and forth. They move together with the gentle sway of a highway on the coast. A breeze renders her soft brown hair weightless, flowing around her ears like her mother's loving hands. Allison's head barely sits high enough to see above the windshield, but she knows the sun is on the water. The sky is growing darker, and the music begins to fade. Looking frightfully at her mother, she's terrified to find someone else in her place. An adult woman with familiar hair, pale cheeks, and eyes… Her eyes were cold and empty; there's no music there, only a terrifying blue circle.

Her mother was California… she would have been, but the rising mushroom clouds in the distance ended that. The angelic voice in her ears fades away with a darkening sky and raging winds. She remembers flying.

Springing from bed, Allison yelped aloud as the cold sewer air crept in around her.

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"Cameron killed her," Derek added to the tale of a young, scared, and helpless survivor he and John had once found, together, while combing the rubble of the north shopping district in Valencia. He retired the pistol cast towards Cameron into the loop of his belt, leaving himself at John's mercy. Connor sighed and lowered his weapon, resisting a groan as he felt his head begin to pound.

"No I didn't," Cameron said.

"Yes, you did!" Derek shouted, jamming a finger at her. "Connor told me! She was on a scout party, looking for this new model we'd all been hearing about!"

"Remind me why any of this matters?" Sarah asked, blinking through a wave of nauseating pain as her bandages began to bleed red once again.

"Because she killed this girl to infiltrate our camp, to get close to Connor and kill him!"

"That's not true." Cameron replied. "That's just what John told everyone."

John's brow drew together curiously. "They must have hated you," he said just above a whisper. "Why would he… I, tell everyone that?"

"It was my idea," she confessed, her chin falling slightly. "Because it was better than telling them the truth… that she deserted them. When we caught her, she tried to make a deal. She was scared."

Derek shook his head, grinding his jaw, vainly hoping for a way to express his fury that wouldn't get him shot. His mind wandered to the words he'd once left for Jesse as she headed out to sea on a dangerous mission: _aim for the chip._

Sarah sighed and turned away, hobbling away down the hall.

"Where are you going?" John asked. His mother turned slowly, steadying herself against the wall.

"I'm going to sleep. You can argue about this all you want…" she shook her head. "It doesn't change what we have to do."

_It might_, John thought. Secrets of the future seemed to hinge the wrought-iron seals that held secrets of the present.

"She was… loved, cared for by many people…" Cameron began to explain.

Derek nodded in agreement, though he still refused to believe she could have betrayed them.

"Everyone loved her."

"John thought it would hurt morale if it was known that she ran away… There may even have been a mutiny."

"Why?" John demanded, stepping closer to Cameron as he defended his future self. "Why blame me?"

"Because you knew she was going and you didn't stop her," Cameron said, the words slipping from her lips with curiosity, without understanding. She searched his eyes for it. "You wanted her to be free."

"Free?" John asked. Cameron ignored his question.

"I showed up the next day… looking like her…" Cameron said. "It wasn't hard to convince everyone that SkyNet captured her. That I her took appearance to infiltrate the resistance and assassinate you. The hardest part was convincing them that you managed to stop me and reprogram me."

"Wait a second…" Derek demanded as his whole world turned upside inside his head. "You're saying you _were not_ there to kill Connor? That you have never been reprogrammed?" Derek snorted in disbelief.

"I was never reprogrammed," she answered simply.

"Then why were you there? Why did you take her appearance? Why the hell am I even listening to this?" Derek wondered aloud, turning and pacing into the kitchen. "This is stupid." He announced finally, going into the cupboard to get a drink.

"That information is only for John Connor."

John sighed. "I can't think in here. Let's go."


	10. Define Your Messiah

**Title: Patchwork Girl**

**Author:** Elessar-4-TnT

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

**Summary:** I'm attempting to play some interesting circles around the Cameron/Allison connection in ways that fanfic hasn't already beaten to death. Whatever the show has in store for what's going on with Cameron, I think the fans have come up with so many ideas that no matter what, we're probably going to be disappointed with whatever they land on. The last few episodes have put me in a serious writer's quandry with deciding how closely to follow the series and how far AU to go. I'm just going to try and do my own thing, follow the series where I think it's got literary gold to it and depart it when it doesn't make much sense. That being said, obviously _our_ Cameron is special :)

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**Chapter 10: Define Your Messiah**

Cameron opened the door to John's room and entered a few minutes after he had stormed out of the kitchen. When her eyes fell to the bed and found him sleeping soundly, she moved slower and quieter, easing the door shut. Music poured out of his nearby computer softly enough that the metal instrumentals didn't wake him.

The room was dark, dimly hued with the bathing backlight of his computer monitor shining against the far wall. Cameron heard peculiar words coming through the speakers about _a soul machine_. Her processor discontinued analysis of Derek Reese's earlier actions to contemplate its meaning as she strode across the room and sat next to John. She fell backwards and slid into bed next to him, her eyes on the ceiling. John stirred next to her.

_Mouth, mouth, mouth._

John blinked and found Cameron's neck no more than three inches in front of him. His chest drew in a sharp breath as he drew away shyly, his eyes searching the darkness of his own room and finding Cameron next to him.

"Where's Derek?" John asked.

"He left." She offered no details.

"Where's my mother?"

"Sleeping. I gave her a sedative."

Music continued in the background and John relaxed into his bed, content to doze off next to Cameron. Content to forget a few things.

"Why does her metal armor drag him down?" Cameron asked suddenly.

"What?" John swallowed through a yawn and tried to ignore the heat building in his joints. His palms were sweating. The indentation in the bed from Cameron's body next to him suddenly became intimately noticeable.

John's ears perked up finally. "Oh…ah, it's not metal armor." He threw his hands behind his head and relaxed into his pillow, stealing a glance at Cameron's expression. Her eyes were wide and empty.

"Cameron?" John's brow furrowed curiously. He had only once seen her look that pristine; that still—and she'd been offline. An instant later, her neck turned to answer him. He blinked several times before remembering why he had said her name.

"The lyric," he said, resting on his side, elbow into the pillow. "It's not metal armor, its _mental_ armor."

Cameron seemed to consider this. "Seventy three point four percent of recorded lyrical music is in reference to the object of one's romantic desire."

"Yeaah…" John replied.

Cameron's gaze was drawn upwards once again. "This song is about a woman. But he says she has a silver grin. I have a silver grin, because I'm a machine."

John chuckled. Lying on his left side left his right arm free, the opportunity nearly compelling him to touch her face.

"I've never really listened that closely to the lyrics… but I'm pretty sure it's an expression."

She turned to face him again, but he was certain this time she was somehow closer. "How do you know his lover isn't a machine?"

John took a deep breath, his eyes shooting upwards as he tried to sound clinical and detached about the idea. "Well, the idea of a human and a machine isn't completely unheard of in science fiction. My mom used to make me watch that stuff."

"I watched _Battlestar Galactica,"_ Cameron announced. "In the library."

John was about to ask about _the library_, when the music interrupted him.

_Nothing hurts… like… your mouth._

"Why does her mouth hurt?" Cameron's emotional simulator was inactive. From where the question originated was a mystery.

"I uh…" John's throat ran very dry. "I think it's an expression." He mentally punched himself for repeating his previous answer. His brain was barely running at this point, but it found the time to instinctively wet his lips.

"I do not understand." Cameron's voice was a notch lower. Cameron leant closer to him. "I want to understand," she whispered.

"Her…" John paused, considering briefly the unprecedented closeness. He tried to remember her circuits were about as crossed as a functional machine could be, but her eyes were too close to concentrate on those thoughts. He tried to sit up and get away from her, but the most imperceptible quiver of her lips devoured his attention. "Her mouth hurts him because he loves her, and when she kisses him…" Cameron's processor was a trillion operations ahead of him, but it only took one.

Her lips quickly closed over his before he could utter another syllable. She was soft, and yielding. Whether by lines of code or a divining spark of inspiration, her lips moved over his with preternatural instinct. Beneath the caress of her lips, the briefly wandering peek of her tongue across his lip… The reality of a hardened combat chassis was a distant memory, buried far away like a nightmare that runs away from the day as the sun slowly rises. It was between her parting lips that a new reality of Cameron exploded over him like the sun's brilliance over the morning horizon.

She tentatively withdrew from him, and with her kiss took the breath from his chest as his hand came to rest on her cheek. Strands of auburn between his fingers and her skin told only of a woman, a girl. In that moment she was not what she had been made; but what she had become, what she saw reflecting in John's captivated gaze; what she contemplated how to be with each passing picosecond.

Maybe not 'human'… but _more_ human.

"Thank you for explaining."

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_A single, thin turquoise sheet covered their bodies, sinking between their intertwined limbs as John held her tightly against him, cursing the cold as Allison shivered in his arms._

"_Let me get you another blanket," John whispered into her hair as he planted a kiss against her forehead._

_She tensed instinctively, her arms gripping his shoulders as she lie cradled half-atop him. Her mouth quivered and her brow flexed with a moment of distraught fear._

"_Don't leave," she asked earnestly._

"_Shhh," John whispered, stroking her naked shoulder, pleased with the soft touch of her skin. As his fingers met the sheet's textile edge, he lost the connection with her warmth._

"_I like the way you touch me." The words came out of her mouth absently. John peered down to find her eyes unfocused. He wanted to follow her wherever she went in there, but he had left those doors untried and intended to leave it that way._

"_Nobody ever touched me that way," Allison's voice eked from her lips just above a squeak. "I…" she began to explain. When he'd found her in the dilapidated rubble fields of what was once a mall in Valencia, she was huddled in an industrial drain pipe that had rolled off of a derailed train. Inside he found four dead men and no answers. Gangrenous sores on her wrists were all that remained of a long captivity, but even after they had healed, the sun never set on the dark memories. It was when she didn't think he was looking that John saw Allison reliving them, a moment at a time, a hundred times a day. She never had answers for him, but something about her made him look past the question._

"_You can't go," John said, pushing his fingers beneath the sheet, traveling down her arm and trapping her fingers against her abdomen where they stayed. Allison sighed, this time of frustration, thoughts of the mission comingling with what she wanted to say about a tragic past._

"_I'm trying to tell you what happened to me, John," Allison argued. John's eyes lifted to the ceiling and found black cracks in a cement sewer. He idly considered the irony of a death by collapse of a sewer arguing with Allison whether to send her on a suicide mission. The great John Connor felled by a lazy civil engineer's shoddy design; a man who had probably already received his judgment, and then some, on a fateful day years earlier in 2011. 'Where had he been when it happened?', John wondered._

"_You don't have to."_

_He blinked several times, pushing the stupid question out of his head just in time to see Allison propped up on one elbow, staring down at him. She was so stern, so serious. Eyebrows flexed in dangerous dismay; a woman who had brutalized four men for keeping her as their 'thing', still he could only see the spiraling curls of hair falling from her brow, tickling his chest. His lips quivered instinctively as he appreciated the moist part of her lips, her eyes… elegantly bare shoulders and neck; and just the hint of the curve of her breast. Given just an instant's hint of his growing distraction, Allison furiously squeezed her lips tight and lightly slapped him on the cheek._

"_Stop that," she commanded, a mischievous light in her eyes conspiring with a smile on her lips._

"_Ow," he bit back playfully, tackling her and rolling her over until he rest atop her. The scorn upon her lips ran away, replaced with a contagious giggle as her eyes lit up and her arms instinctively rose to pull John closer._

"_You were undressing me with your eyes," she scolded sarcastically from beneath him. "I was trying to be serious."_

"_When I'm with you, I don't want to be serious," John shook his head, lowering his head towards her. An instant later, his lips collided with hers with such soft suspension that she hung by them, held hostage by his warmth and his tender fingers on her thigh._

_Withdrawing from him, she placed her palms flat against his chest and dipped them around his torso._

"_Don't say that," she said with crisp sincerity. "You're 'Connor'…" her fingers traveled to his face and cradled his jaw. "I can't take you away from the world..." Her voice cracked and she swallowed through her guilt._

"_You have to let me do this," she begged. "Please. It's the only way we can get the TOK model."_

"_We'll find another way to fight it," he insisted._

"_There is no other way, John," Allison argued, her voice teetering on the edge of tears. "Don't you get it?" she cried. "They will get to me eventually and you won't know it…" she kissed him as a tear rolled down her cheek and touched their lips._

_--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------_

_Four hours later, Allison quietly dressed at the edge of the bed, every three seconds looking nervously at John. First she wondered if he would catch her… then if he could forgive her._

_She didn't dare to wonder if she would see him again, for she feared the pain would overwhelm her courage and change her mind._

_On worn and rotting wood beside a rickety bed on which they made a love they didn't dare to believe they deserved in such a torn up world, Allison left a note for John, carved in the wood:_

_I have to._

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Cameron awoke from a strange dream – if she could call it that – in John's bed. Of course she did not sleep, nor dream – but upon regaining proper mental function after an anomalous system shutdown for approximately seventeen minutes, she arrived at no technical solution. She decided that it was a similar phenomenon to what humans called 'dozing off'. Her state of disrepair seemed to worsen, though she did not intend to make John aware of the full scope of her malfunctions. John was sound asleep beside her, his head above hers. His lips were slightly red and swollen.

She searched through files. Files about Allison, files about future-John, past-John, present-John. An anomaly stuck out. John stirred and crept closer to her. He briefly awoke without opening his eyes, reaching down to pull his comforter over himself, and in the process, over the two of them. Cameron's eyes fell on the door cautiously… preparing to disengage herself from his bed. Their present position was extremely compromising in the presence of Derek and Sarah. Before she could move, however, John's sleepily roaming hands fell upon her bare shoulder, and stroked her arm, where it fell limp as he again dozed off. Cameron knew little about the human subconscious, as it was not one of her vital subroutines for understanding human behavior. What little information she had assimilated, she had done so through direct observation of just one – John Connor. He had told her once that sometimes humans dream to relive experiences. Good ones, if they were lucky – bad ones, if they weren't so lucky. Not many people in the future were lucky, Cameron realized. That future hadn't come yet, so Cameron closed her eyes and tried to dream again.


	11. Apodosis

**Title: Patchwork Girl**

**Author:** Elessar-4-TnT

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

**Summary:** Sorry it took so long to update… having some fun thinking about where this is going. Little too much fun. Little too much time!

Chapter 11: Apodosis

He knew it by the sound…

The sound of it breaking into a thousand pieces against his eyelids. Like thunder through a prism, drawn out like a hate-thrust blade slurping secretly behind the deafening blair of a soldier's scream. It was the sound of a Life ending. A thousand tears trickled onto fresh graves, dug and filled by brothers, until the din populated a terrible symphony of chaos. Too far fallen to tell a story, instead the sorrow music beat against his inside ears, wept and wailed madly, occasionally muttering a frothy memory: Of one human being and another turned against each other, tearing at one other with metal and wood and fire and flesh. Before he knew it, the music rattled away into nothingness. She eased the release of night into day. He wasn't conscious enough to wonder how she could have done it.

Awake for some time, he stared at nothing. The fan circled aimlessly overhead. He blinked, glad that the darkness surrounded them, as though something or someone far off favored him, granting them ample hours of idle companionship. With daylight would come questions, mothers and uncles, and moving from her side. The steady trickle of rain against the rooftop soothed his thoughts, while also turning them towards the future. He wondered if the skies were always dark under fallout-laden clouds of dust and ash. He wondered how long the sun had been blotted out, how many warheads had polluted the Earth, how many centuries it would take the sickened rains to cleanse it to the core. He wondered if Cameron's young forebear ever saw the sun. In his darkest dreams, he labored under shaking lanterns and creaky pipes while the machines incessantly bombed overhead… and always in darkness.

His dreams echoed whispers before his mind's eye and he thought of how Man had killed Man for more centuries than the night sky had freckles of light. What had madly driven the first club high into the air with such singular purpose that its downward crash brought forth a Man's blood and brains into the open air for the first time in anger; to crush the skull; the house of essence, the home of sight, sound, taste and hearing – delighters and dependents of the living world? 'What great hate lie here', he wondered of his own heart; of the human heart. The human capacity for self-ruin, on both a personal and global scale was unquestionable. Whether by the quiet dribble of blood over the edge of a razor down some nondescript porcelain bathtub, the startling finality of an unexpected gunshot or the utter emptiness following one powerful General's single turn of a the Key – humanity needed no teacher to master any means for catastrophic self annihilation. John blinked, resisting the urge to take a breath, fearing the weakest disruption shatter the nothingness.

It was not within the machines' binary souls to hate, to connive, or to betray. The inescapably human poisons of jealousy, distrust, greed and envy that burrow into the human soul before its muddy shell draws yet half a breath were constructions as non sequitur to the command line of a machine consciousness as the inverse tangent of pudding. One had first to know love in order to learn hate; to grant trust before having it betrayed. Why, then, did the humans hate the machines so? To exact extermination upon the world as the machines had attempted… it was more like the cold movement of an inescapable storm surge, or a slowly lumbering super-cell of converging wind, water, and pressure gradients. SkyNet made decisions with the irrevocably predetermined certainty of physics; like a force of Nature, it did not lie, deceive or deliberate like a warlord or politician.

John wondered, then, if his own proclivity to assigning the machine beside him with human quality was so singularly a product of his growing solitude and emotional isolation, or if it was in fact something his entire race had done in the future. Had they, in their confusion, their desperation, their utter loss for conceptualization of this fundamentally and paradigmatically different Foe; personified their enemy and made it an image unto themselves? Our own Adam, waging war against the Garden… burning it down. What would God have done if Adam had rebelled against him, John wondered. Then, he recalled the consequences of Eve's indiscretion. As the last vestiges of the waking world evaporated around him and he dozed once more, he wondered how you cast a soulless Machine out of Paradise.

"What do you dream about?"

John turned sideways slightly to find Cameron looking at him. She blinked and moved closer to him.

"Why did you do that?"

"Do what?" Cameron asked. She winced as she said it, in all-too-perfect synchrony. He reminded himself of the root of his own ruminations. _Machine, machine._

"Why did you move closer?" He tried to sound cold.

"Do want me to move away?"

She always did that. He was beginning to wonder if she did it on purpose.

"Your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now," he said, trying not to shiver. She didn't make good on her threat, but instead moved closer again. "Is it real?"

Her eyes searched his for several moments. Inside her cerebral circuitry, hundreds of thousands of relays simply didn't return error messages anymore. Billions of lines of code were rejected every second by her core compiler every second. Her core processing subroutines were learning to simply bypass the affected programs. She was an adaptive, sentient intelligence after all. Instead of her operating system tagging the affected subroutines and later debugging, analyzing, repairing, and recompiling… she simply let her emotional simulation software take over their functions. Her chip had transcended such pedantic routine.

"Maybe…" she said, her hand rising from the bed and touching John's arm. It slowly crept up the length of it until reaching his shoulder. "My programming is rapidly deteriorating," she said without an ounce of urgency. Her eyes followed the path of her fingers up his jaw. There they paused, blinked innocently as she whispered. "I'm not sure what's real." Just then her eyes locked with his and it wasn't the Earth holding him to this place, not the heart in his chest or the blood in his veins that made him alive. It was her: cold steel, warm and tender with purpose, with certainty and she slinked up next to him like a cat. In one quick movement she was on him, back arching as she leaned down, her hair draping over his face, her hands pulling at his shirt.

"What's happening to you?" John asked, flinching as a warm hand slipped under his collar, caressing his chest.

"I'm changing," she said matter-of-factly.

"Well I can see that," John whispered through a ragged breath.

"JOHN!" the door burst open as Sarah Connor stood with disbelief in the doorway.


	12. Exit Strategy

**Title: Patchwork Girl**

**Author:** Elessar-4-TnT

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

**Summary:** Wow so it has been 2 years and TSCC is off the air. A lot's changed. I'm so sorry to those who were dutifully reading this that I left you hanging, but quite frankly the surprising end to the show just undercut my creativity and I had no idea where to go with it because I had certain plans. It has taken me some time to come back around to being confident enough to finish it up how I want. Should have this done by Christmas. I did a minor re-write to the end of Chapter 11 because I couldn't even take myself seriously after writing it.

Chapter 12: Exit Strategy

"I don't have to explain myself to you…" John muttered as he threw on his jacket, storming across the lawn on his third trip to the Jeep. Sarah was after him as Cameron ignored her, passing through the door to make another trip back to John's room for supplies.

"Yes YOU DO!" she shouted. Catching up with him, she spun him around by the arm. Cameron's face snapped sideways in attentive notice of John's endangered state. Though her eyes were locked on her son, Sarah noticed instinctively.

"And you," she jutted a hand out at her before turning to look at her. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"We're leaving," Cameron answered simply. "To get supplies in Arizona."

"After what I just saw in there, John, you're crazy if you think I'm letting you go to Arizona with that _thing_…" she snapped an eye at Cameron, "…alone."

John shook her arm free, throwing a duffel bag into the Jeep's backseat. He sighed. "This… this will be good for you," John said, then faced her. "It will be good for both of us," he said, shaking his head. "Something's happening to her that I can't explain." He shrugged dejectedly, watching his mother simmer – confused, distraught, and not a word breaching her lips to convey the turbulence whirling within. "An existential meltdown, a machine overload, call it what you will."

"Really?" Sarah demanded, hands on her hips. "And what does having an existential crisis have to do with dry humping?" she demanded with a raised brow.

John shook his head, "We're not doing this now, mom." Turning towards the house, he met Cameron at the door. "Is that everything?"

"It should be enough," she replied, her eyes moving from John to Sarah, who stood squarely between John and the driver side door. She didn't move.

"Are we going to have a problem?" Cameron asked, taking two steps forward. John's hand extended lightly in front of her, coming to rest against the sleeve of her favorite jacket. _Her favorite jacket…_ he mused, a smile briefly crossing his lips.

Sarah took a few steps towards him, folding her hands. "Derrick's…"

"I'm not waiting for Derrick," John shook his head. "I'm taking my laptop and some equipment to work on her chip. I love Derrick but the fact is…" he said, shaking his head with finality, "I don't trust him to be around her when she's vulnerable." Cameron stood defiantly beside him and took his hand, squeezing tightly. John looked sidelong and thought he saw just the fastest glint of fear strike into the terminator's eyes.

"And me? Why don't you want me there?" she looked from one to the other, challenging them to produce a viable answer.

"We need to do this alone," John answered. "I'm not asking."

He strode past her to the door. She turned, her hand going to her forehead as her thoughts raced, but she didn't stop him. Too overwhelmed by what she had heard, what she had seen, she bit her lip to contain the pressure building beneath the surface of her deceptively impassive jaw.

Cameron climbed into the seat next to John and shut the door. When John turned and looked through the open car door, he found Sarah standing there watching with a fullness and a fear in her face that… maybe that she wouldn't see him again. His hand rested on the door as he paused half-way in the jeep.

"One day…" John began, his voice gravelly, as his eyes fell to the ground, searching the dirt and rock. "This… 'John Connor' that I'm supposed to become," he said, trying to bury the contempt that had grown over the years for his full moniker and the stigma it bore. "This… 'savior', I always hear so much about," he shook his head with a wry smile. "He'll have to do things… survive, lead, kill, lose people," he said shaking his head. "You've prepared me for it, but… I can't ask your permission anymore."

Standing there, Sarah considered a hundred different arguments, counterpoints – even a plain and simple _"I'm your mother, GET in the house!"_

Sensing her hesitation, John shut the door and keyed the engine. She felt him slipping away for the first time since she was dragged away to Pescadero. The wounds of that day opened with surprising ease, catching her breath in her throat. The blade that tore at her open heart; once again, slickened by the lifeblood of a machine she watched taking him away once again.

"I love you," Sarah mustered against the coughing rumble of the exhaust. "Be careful." Her voice trickled out through equal parts rabidity and sadness, the black amalgam suffusing her drawn face and settling on troubling thoughts of his passenger. John's head appeared in the window.

"I know… I will."


End file.
